The Official VisionWeb Blog

Optometry patient care involves getting to know your patients' names and faces, especially those who return year after year. However, you'll sometimes encounter a patient who returns after they've been rude, left a bad review, complained about your products, or caused a scene in your practice. How do you react in these situations?

We first have to keep in mind that we all have bad days and make mistakes. Usually, the best course of action in the face of conflict within your practice is to keep neutral. You want the patient to feel cared for, think highly of your professionalism, and hopefully return. This doesn't change for negative patients. Let's go over three common scenarios and how you can respond to them.

Sometimes practices outgrow their space, expand their staff quickly, or are required to move due to landlords and building policies. However, moving can cause unexpected stress on your staff and stop growth for your practice. Not to mention, moving can confuse loyal patients or result in a loss of local customers.

Moving your practice is kind of like moving your home, but exponentially more difficult if you have servers, paper files, and other secure patient data onsite. That's why we encourage you to question whether your practice would benefit from uprooting its physical location or whether something else might satisfy your need for change. 

When is the last time you physically looked something up in the yellow pages? Most searches for local businesses today happen through Google search or Google maps. If your practice's online presence isn't optimized for local search, you could be costing your practice tons of new patients.

Local search is when a consumer seeks information online in a specific geographic area with the intention of making a transaction offline. Today we want to share with you not only why local search is important, but also what you can do to make sure your practice is better represented.

Making personal connections, interacting with a team, and keeping motivated at work can mean very different things for different people. Each personality test is useful for highlighting different parts of your employees' way of thinking and functioning. 

The ancient enneagram assessment is more about individuals' emotions and self perception. The test divides people into 9 categories based on how they interact within society and how they fuel their internal self. 

Keep reading to see how you can boost your staff productivity using the Enneagram test.

Just about every business is going to receive at least a few negative online reviews. Usually the customer truly had an unfavorable experience, but what about those Yelp reviews that are unfair and portray an inaccurate or exaggerated explanation of the situation? If your business doesn't have a lot of reviews in the first place, one negative review blown out of proportion can hurt your overall rating and may cause hesitation from new patients.

If you notice an offensive or incorrect review, there are steps you can take to try and get help from Yelp to remove reviews that violate their content guidelines. In case your request for removal is denied by Yelp, we have some advice for taking your own stance against these types of reviews.